Salam Festival on Sufi Music: UNC North Carolina, UCAD Dakar, GFM Dakar and WARC Dakar team up to boost the academic component of the event
Every year (for the past three years), during the month of Ramadan, the celebrated Senegalese music star Youssou Ndour and his media group GFM hold, for over ten days, a festival of sacred music in Senegal with the participation of music groups hailing from Senegal, Morocco, Mauritania and several other Muslim countries.
For the 2017 edition, the initiator had earlier expressed the desire to give the event a more established academic component. In this respect, University Cheikh Anta Diop, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the West African Research Center (WARC) were approached. That is why this year’s Salam Festival kicked off with a three-day symposium on Sufi Zikr performance.
WARC Director, Professor Ousmane Sene, and world-renowed Senegalese singer, Youssou Ndour, having a captivating discussion at the Salam Festival symposium
Since Monday, June 5 in the main amphitheater of University Cheikh Anta Diop campus, 15 participants from Turkey and 12 from the United States (mainly from UNC Chapel Hill) have been exchanging ideas on various themes such as Sufi Figures, Forces and Localities, Sufi Geneses and Genealogies, Sufi Voices etc….. Meanwhile and for over ten days, every evening the Senegalese capital Grand Theatre, Daniel Sorano National Theatre in Dakar and many other meeting squares in the capital and other parts of the country will be enlivened with the rapturous chants and songs from Senegalese, Turkish, Moroccan, Mauritanian religious singers.
Left to right: Mr Youssou Ndour; Prof Ibrahima Thioub, Rector, UCAD; University of North Carolina delegates: Prof Carl Earnst and Michael A. Figueroa; Moroccan Ambassador to Senegal
